Sensing Borderlands

Chapter 5 probes the visualization of the spaces of transnational militarism—the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and US military camptowns in South Korea—that are, for most Koreans, imagined spaces existing beyond the sovereignty of South Korea in the name of peace keeping. The chapter explores the unexpected paths of repetition via photographic representation by looking at the ways in which selected art and photography projects undo the national rhetoric of futurity prescribed in relentless adherence to anti-communist ideology and neoliberal desire (while seeming to oscillate between the two), and it considers how such projects create novel paths for repetition to take. Points of focus include the ongoing Real DMZ Project and the reverberations in and of landscape photographs depicting lands and lives expropriated for military purposes. The discussion also brings in multisensorial and spatial encounters with photography and art, especially in yielding the mediated experiences of the borderlands.